The Enthusiasm Gap

For the past six months, the pundits and prognosticators have forecast a Republican sweep in the midterm elections. Democrats are expected to lose the House and perhaps the Senate because of a lurch to the political right and a so-called "enthusiasm gap." If you will permit me, the electorate has not, despite Republican daydreams, shifted to the right and, if there ever was an enthusiasm gap, it is closing fast. Democrats are not sitting this one out.

Immediately after the inauguration, even before the president had done a single thing, a harsh anti-Obama anger rose from the right. Locally the tea parties sprang up and nationally Sarah Palin took the stage on her way to the 2012 Republican nomination for president.

Those hard-core Republicans were a pre-existing condition, not part of any rightward shift. They did not and will not vote for any Democrat. Their anger reflects their unwillingness to accept that president Obama is an American or a Christian, much less the president of the United States. They voted for McCain – Palin. Remember 46 percent of the country actually voted to make Sarah Palin Vice President to an old man with a bad heart!

At the same time, the tea party is to some degree real, even if it has only a 20 percent approval rating. Like any such third-party movement, intensity can make up for lack of numbers. These movements outside our two major parties have traditionally impacted only the political narrative. Very shortly, as with Know-Nothings, Teddy Roosevelt's progressives or Eugene V. Debs' socialists, they will be absorbed absorbed by the mainstream.

Unfortunately for the president, what he did was not enough to rouse his own base but more than enough to rile up the opposition. This riled up anger on the right was met by bored dismissal and then irritation on the left. The Democrats had a hard time understanding the Republican anger. They asked, how could anyone really want to go back to the catastrophically failed policies of the Bush Republicans? This fire on the right and smoke on left generated the perception of an enthusiasm gap: Republicans all fired up and Democrats sitting at home.

The Democratic base had daydreamed real big: immediately closing Guantánamo, single-payer healthcare, a cap and trade system and a smashing of the New York financial power centers that caused the Great Recession. No way was that going to happen; our system has too many checks and balances for that.

The president had much more modest and more realistic goals. That does not mean that he did not accomplished enormous things, he did. Those things just didn't happen to be high on the priority list of either base, however necessary they may be. Nor are they as transformational as either party hopes or fears.

Is this enthusiasm gap enough of a wave to carry the Republicans to leadership in the House and Senate? Not hardly.

First, everything points to a surging Democratic awakening to the election. In the early voting states, the number of Democrats leads Republicans by 10 percent. President Obama's approval rating has risen to 54 percent when it was below 50 percent. In the generic Congressional ballot Newsweek reports that Democrats are leading Republicans 48 percent to 42 percent.

Second, the enthusiasm gap itself is suspect because the polling methodology is biased toward Republicans. Cell phones are the biggest and most serious of the culprits. Most of the polls the public hears about are telephone surveys that make little or no provision for those people who have only cell phones. That ever-growing group of people, mostly the young and well-educated, break 2:1 for Democratic candidates.

The Democrats have not been engaged because the Obama administration did not do a good job of engaging them – or the rest of the electorate for that matter. Now the administration is making the fear-based argument that the Democrats have to get out and vote, not for a positive Obama program but to avoid a return to the policies of George Bush. A "Speaker of the House" John Boehner argument conjures up government by the changelings who are being birthed in the tea party and welcomed into the Republican mainstream.

That the other guy is worse is not an argument to stir the masses. The kind of argument that stirs a march on Washington is being made by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert with their Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive. It all seems a bit Halloweenish and too late to impact the election but who knows what it will develop into?

There is a reasonable case for a pro-Republican bias in the polls and for a strong Democratic surge late in this campaign. This reality seriously blunts Republican daydreams of a massive conservative shift. If the trends continue, and I think they will, the Republicans will not win either house.